ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER

Issue #002 | Things Companies Don’t Want You to Know | March 2026

In 1967, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to publish a rigged literature review in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. It took 50 years for anyone to find out.

BY THE NUMBERS

For decades, you were told to cut fat from your diet. Butter was bad. Eggs were dangerous. Whole milk was a heart attack in a glass.

Meanwhile, sugar got a free pass. Cereal boxes loaded with it. Low-fat products that replaced fat with sugar. An entire food industry built on the idea that fat was the enemy.

That idea didn’t come from objective science. It came from a deliberate campaign by the sugar industry to shift the blame away from their product and onto dietary fat.

And it worked for half a century.

By the early 1960s, researchers around the world were publishing studies that linked sugar consumption to coronary heart disease. The evidence was mounting. And the sugar industry was watching.

The Sugar Research Foundation — a trade group now known as the Sugar Association — represented 30 international sugar producers. Their entire business model depended on Americans eating more sugar, not less.

In 1964, an internal SRF memo proposed launching what it called a “major program” to “refute our detractors.” The vice president of research, John Hickson, was tasked with making it happen.

His approach was simple: fund scientists to produce a review that would clear sugar and blame fat instead.

In 1965, after a spike in media attention around sugar and heart disease, the SRF approved what they internally called “Project 226.”

Hickson recruited two Harvard researchers for the job. One of them was D. Mark Hegsted, a prominent nutrition scientist. The other was Fredrick Stare, chair of Harvard’s School of Public Health Nutrition Department — who also happened to sit on the SRF’s own scientific advisory board.

The SRF paid them the equivalent of approximately $50,000 in today’s dollars. They handpicked the studies to be reviewed. They set the objective of the review. And they received and reviewed drafts before publication.

The published review, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, was a masterclass in selective analysis.

Every study that linked sugar to heart disease was dismissed. Epidemiological studies were rejected for having “too many confounding factors.” Animal studies were thrown out as “not applicable to humans.” Human trials that showed sugar’s harmful effects were discarded because the diets used were supposedly “not feasible.”

But when it came to studies that blamed fat? The same types of evidence — epidemiological, animal, and human studies — were accepted with minimal scrutiny.

The review’s conclusion was unambiguous: there was “no doubt” that reducing fat and cholesterol was the only dietary intervention needed to prevent coronary heart disease. Sugar was effectively cleared.

And the New England Journal of Medicine published it without any disclosure of industry funding. At the time, the journal did not require conflict-of-interest statements.

The impact of this single review was enormous.

D. Mark Hegsted — one of the two Harvard researchers paid by the sugar industry — later became head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture. In that role, he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.

Those guidelines told Americans to cut fat. Not sugar.

The food industry responded accordingly. “Low-fat” became the holy grail of health food marketing. Products were reformulated to remove fat — and sugar was added to compensate for the lost flavor. Breakfast cereals, yogurt, salad dressings, bread — sugar crept into everything.

Meanwhile, obesity rates climbed. Type 2 diabetes tripled over the following decades. Heart disease remained the leading cause of death in the developed world.

And the sugar industry’s market share? It exploded.

The entire scheme might have stayed buried forever if not for Cristin Kearns, a dentist-turned-researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

In 2016, Kearns and her colleagues published a paper in JAMA Internal Medicine based on more than 340 internal sugar industry documents — totaling over 1,500 pages — that they had discovered in public archives.

The documents revealed every step: the SRF’s strategic decision to fund biased research, the recruitment of Harvard scientists, the handpicking of studies, the review of drafts, and the internal satisfaction when the published result matched their objectives.

This isn’t just a historical curiosity. The consequences are still playing out.

Dietary guidelines have only recently begun to catch up. It took until 2015 for the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to acknowledge that dietary cholesterol was not the threat it had been made out to be. And added sugars are only now being recognized as a significant risk factor for heart disease, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome.

The sugar industry’s playbook — fund favorable research, suppress inconvenient findings, and let the results shape public policy — has since been documented across dozens of industries, from tobacco to pharmaceuticals to fossil fuels.

But the sugar case remains one of the clearest, most well-documented examples of corporate money distorting science that was supposed to protect public health.

One trade group. Two Harvard scientists. A single literature review in a prestigious journal. No disclosure.

That was all it took to reshape the diets of billions of people for half a century.

SOURCES

Kearns, C., Schmidt, L., Glantz, S. — “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research”, JAMA Internal Medicine (2016)

NPR — “50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat” (2016)

STAT News — “Sugar industry secretly paid for favorable Harvard research” (2016)

PBS NewsHour — “How sugar industry paid experts to downplay health risks” (2016)

UCSF SugarScience — Sugar Papers archive (sugarscience.ucsf.edu)